But I'm glad to hear that Hibernate is quite easy to start with. The moment I get some time off I will certainly jump in the deep and try to survive:)
There is a middle ground between a full-fledged O/R mapping layer and raw JDBC calls. You could, for instance, try Spring's JDBC template classes [1], as they take care of the tedious, repetitive and error-prone, like setting up a connection, managing transactions, handling errors and properly releasing resources.
An advantage of using Spring is also that it supports Hibernate and JDO out-of-the-box, so graduating from JDBC to an O/R persistence layer might be easier.
DISCLAIMER: I've never used Spring, just read its documentation and I really like what I've seen so far. Might be using it for a future project, though.
Ugo
http://www.springframework.org/docs/reference/jdbc.html
